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Back 30 years ago, After Burner and Thunderblade ruled the arcades.
As a kid, I only had an Amiga and near zero coding skills to produce very (very) weak clones.
Now a seasoned programmer with the mighty power of PICO-8, I can beat a Sega X board!
Well, err...:

Title screen:
Title image is loaded from a stringified image, decompression done 'asynchronously' with yield.

Main screen:

Buildings are mostly drawn with many rectfill using a big checkerboard pattern to simulate windows/floors.

Everything is z-sorted (w actually ;) before being drawn. This 'zbuffer' is in charge of drawing every asset.

Game screen manager:
A light version of what I've extensively used during my XNA period. Allows nice decoupling between game loop and other loops (title, game over).

Coroutines:
Used only for rare events (like player dying) to easily control animation and state changes.

Lessons Learned
• PICO-8 is a fantastic platform. Forces you to keep things simple (say that to my dozen or so failed Unity attempts...)
• token count is everything
• Coroutines are unfortunately too slow to be used in the core game loop
• Throw OOP techniques out. The nice class:method() construct eats up too many tokens - had to rewrite half of the code to stays within the limits :[
• bnot-cheating the platform is way too easy (but resisted against!)
• Did I say token count is everything?

@morningtoast:
The point of releasing the game was to move on.
This is my first completed project on the platform and I hit the limits left and right!
I had big plans to uncompress levels from string resources (but it breaks compressed size limit) and the famous caves (but it breaks token limits).
Fell free to start over from this material ;)

Hmmm....you might be right in that it took a tiny bit of extra time before the chopper reacted to your control, but when it did, it was full speed. In your version it starts slow then speeds up over time, and that's a bit annoying. I say fix it and this thing is great! :)

This version is a lot more difficult. The effects are great, though. I think the next super scaler you do, since you have a nice engine now, the actual gameplay aspect polished up would make a sick cart. Cool stuff...I'm a superscaler fan, so I'm glad others are doing projects like this. I think that specific kind of visualization style didn't get enough exploration when it was around, and it's an area of graphics/lofi/pixel art interest I have...I know, we all have our computer graphics fettishes.